Cowon has a giant booth this time around, now that they have some working models to show off. Back in January we found them at CES but all they had was mock-ups of their new players - the M5, X5, and A2.


The good news is that we finally got our hands on the X5 and shot about 50 pictures worth. The color screen and build quality are quite good. It's not too big or fat, and the joystick controller works well enough for navigation. The bad news is that they still haven't managed to work in an iD3-tag database, so browsing through content is file/folder based. Of course we asked about this, and they could only tell us that it's... very difficult. Strange, because they did manage to add a full-size LCD, color GUI, picture viewing, movie playback, and USB Host functionality to the long list of features already found on the M3. And like the M3, all your line-in, line-out, and power connections require the use of a dock or special cable that connects to the proprietary data port on the bottom edge of the X5.


We also got to see the one working A2 player in existance, though it wasn't 100% functional yet and we weren´t allowed to touch it ourselves. Screen quality, movie playback, and the GUI look very nice from what we can tell. MSRP will be around $ 400, IIRC.


The X5 will be available in the Korean market first followed by distribution in the US a month or two later, so figure another couple months wait, at least. The M5, a monochrome-screen version of the X5, will be out even later. It sounded like all thier energy is focused on the X5 right now as they had little to say about the M5. They weren't quite sure when the A2 will be available either, other than, soon.